argument—that the progressives challenged the “monied
interests.” By the 1930s, when the nation was mired in
depression, many blamed the progressives. In 1932 John
Chamberlain published a Farewell to Reformthat excori-
ated progressive leaders for failing to check the power of
the trusts. That failure, Richard Hofstadter (1955) declared,
was rooted in their psychology. The progressives, mostly
members of the middle class and the declining old elites,
felt threatened by the increasing power and status of the
new tycoons, many of them coarse, domineering, and fond
of vulgar display. Progressive reformers sought to restore
“familiar and traditional ideals,” and their solutions were
as old-fashioned as their goals. Revisionist historians such
as Gabriel Kolko (1963) pushed Hofstadter’s argument still
further: The progressives failed to change society because
they never meant to promote meaningful change. They
endorsed government regulation to prevent anarchic eco-
nomic competition, and they hoped to ameliorate the
plight of workers to forestall revolution. Their “progres-
sivism” was in fact the “triumph of conservatism.” Daniel
Rodgers (1998) was among the many who insisted that
this portrait was overdrawn. The progressives in the
United States were not much different from reformers at
that time in Europe. All shared a dynamic rhetoric; all
sought to counteract the increasing concentration of
industrial power; none met with great success. In 2003
Michael McGerr went further still: Progressivism was not
simply a political movement, but a far-reaching moral pro-
ject aimed at reinvigorating American life more generally
In the cartoon TR is armed only with the sword of “Public
Service.” Was his cause noble—or irrelevant?Source: John Chamberlain,Farewell to Reform(1932); Richard Hofstadter, The
Age of Reform(1955); Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism(1963); Allen
Weinstein,The Decline of Socialism in America(1967); Robert Wiebe, The Search
for Order(1967); Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings(1998); Michael McGerr, A
Fierce Discontent(2003).J
ack and the Wall Street Giantsshows a diminutive Teddy
Roosevelt taking on the titans of Wall Street, among
them railroad barons James J. Hill and Jay Gould and
financier J. P. Morgan. The cartoon anticipates the familiar
DEBATING THE PAST
Were the Progressives
Forward-Looking?
569■ ■ ■ ■ ■With Congress unwilling to pass a stiff regula-
tory law, Roosevelt resorted to the Sherman Act to
get at the problem. Although the Supreme Court
decision in the Sugar Trust case (E.C. Knight
[1895], see p. 477) seemed to have emasculated
that law, in 1902 he ordered the Justice
Department to bring suit against the Northern
Securities Company.
He chose his target wisely. The Northern
Securities Company controlled three different railroad
companies. It had been created in 1901 after a titanic
battle on the New York Stock Exchange between the
forces of J. P. Morgan and James J. Hill and those of
E. H. Harriman, who was associated with the
Rockefeller interests. In their efforts to obtain control
of the Northern Pacific, the rivals had forced its stock
up to $1,000 a share, ruining many speculators and
threatening to cause a panic.
Neither side could win a clear-cut victory, so they
decided to put the stock of all three railroads in a